ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

McFarland standards

Okay, so imagine you are playing a game with your friends and you want to make sure that everyone is playing fairly. You might come up with some rules to make sure that everyone follows the same guidelines.

Well, in science, researchers also want to make sure that they are all following the same rules and using the same methods to measure things. That's where McFarland standards come in.

McFarland standards are a way to measure the amount of bacteria in a sample. Bacteria are tiny organisms that can make us sick, so scientists want to be able to measure them accurately.

To do this, they use a set of standards developed by a scientist named McFarland. These standards are basically tubes filled with different amounts of bacteria. Each tube has a different number of bacteria in it, ranging from a little bit to a lot.

Scientists can compare their own samples to these McFarland tubes to see how much bacteria they have. They do this by mixing a little bit of their sample with a solution and then adding it to the McFarland tube. If the bacteria in their sample are similar in amount to the bacteria in one of the McFarland tubes, they can use that tube as a standard to measure the rest of their sample.

So, in summary, McFarland standards are a set of tubes with different amounts of bacteria in them that scientists use to measure the amount of bacteria in their own samples. It's like having a set of rules for how to measure things, just like you might have rules for playing a game with your friends.